Our Assignment

The third culture is Embedded. Here's what I said about it in A Tale of
Three Cultures:

I was at the Embedded Systems Conference in San Francisco, which seemed a
world away in time. It was a big conference, filling most of both the North
and South Halls at the Moscone Center. Linux was huge here. Domination of
the embedded world looks no less inevitable, in spite of the huge Microsoft
and Wind River booths, which stood out like boulders in the stream of
history.

[Embedded is] purely technical. It's pre-Net, pre-UNIX and maybe even
pre-cultural. It shows up where raw technology meets the real world, and
its concerns are utterly practical. "Here's the problem", it
says. "Let's
solve it." This is a heads-down culture and civilization depends on it.
Embedded systems are what run our cash registers and brake systems, our
airplane guidance systems, our factory robotics, our flow meters, our
stoplights and our heating systems. The Net and Linux are both handy ways
to solve countless embedded systems problems—extremely handy, it turns
out. One morning at SXSW I read that embedded Linux will soon run in
something like 60,000 cash registers at Home Depot. It's a big story, but
mostly a technical one. Does Home Depot give a damn about Linux as a cause?
Or about the lawmaking that threatens to turn the Net into nothing more
than a backbone for industrial-grade commerce, plus a bunch of culverts for
moving "content" stamped and sanitized by ubiquitous digital content
management? I kind of doubt it.

Good as it is, and much as we celebrate its success, Android is an embedded
Linux operating system. It is also run by one giant company. The Android
source FAQ makes that quite clear. Android is Google's show. To contrast
that with Linux, dig what Andrew Mortontold me a few years back:

Look for example at the IBM engineers that do work on the kernel. They
understand (how it works) now. They are no longer IBM engineers that work
on the kernel. They're kernel developers that work for IBM. My theory here
is that if IBM management came up to one of the kernel developers and said
"Look, we need to do that", the IBM engineer would not say,
"Oh, the kernel
team won't accept that." He'd say "WE won't accept
that." Because now they
get it. Now they understand the overarching concern we have for the
coherency and longevity of the code base.

One point here is that kernel developers are autonomous individuals who
work for the kernel, not for any one company—even if that company
employs them to work on the kernel. The same goes for the people we call
"users". The Net, by design, supports autonomy, independence and freedom for
everybody. Protocols such as HTTP, FRP, IRC, NNTP, POP, SMTP and IMAP all
give individuals their own way of connecting with and communicating with
anybody or anything, outside any one company's or government's
controlling systems. Those all embodied principles I call NEA: Nobody owns
it, Everybody can use it, and Anybody can improve it. Linux is that way
too. It's only natural for companies operating in the Net's wide open
commons to try enclosing it. Usually this fails. (Read Greg Kroah-Hartman's
take on what Apple's doing with Thunderbolt, for a perfect example of what
these big companies never seem to learn.) But I'm not sure about Hollywood.
It won the battle that Larry Lessig outlined 14 years ago. And now
Linux geekery is highly diluted by its embedded uses and the corporate
purposes of embedded development work. The tragedy of the Internet's
commons is one where free and open geek culture is losing to the cultures
of Hollywood and embedded development, and the expediencies of both.

But the cause of freedom got a huge lift from Edward Snowden's revelations
about NSA spying. That was a wake-up call, and the world has not fallen
asleep since then. In fact, the world is now more awake than ever to the
high level of surveillance going on in the digital world, and its threats
to freedom. So, while the sun shines, we can make hay.

A year before the Snowden revelations, Eben Moglen gave a keynote at
Freedom to Connect followed by a
conversation onstage with Isaac Wilder and
myself. After Eben walked from podium to chair, I said what he gave was not
only one of the best speeches I had ever heard, but one of the most
important. I stand by that claim today. You can find audio at
Archive.org,
video on YouTube (), and a
transcript
at the Software
Freedom Law Center.
The talk was 47 minutes long and addressed to
the same audience I am writing for here: people with a deep and abiding
interest in free and open software and hardware. Here is my abridged hack
of the transcript:

The greatest technological innovation of the late 20th century is the thing
we now call the World Wide Web. An invention less than 8000 days old. That
invention is already transforming human society more rapidly than anything
since the adoption of writing....

The browser made the Web very easy to read. Though we built Apache, though
we built the browsers, though we built enormous numbers of things on top of
Apache and the browsers, we did not make the Web easy to write. So a little
thug in a hooded sweatshirt made the Web easy to write, and created a man
in the middle attack on human civilization, which is unrolling now to an
enormous music of social harm. But that's the intermediary innovation that
we should be concerned about. We made everything possible including,
regrettably, PHP, and then intermediaries for innovation turned it into the
horror that is Facebook.

If we'd had a little bit more disintermediated innovation, if we had made
running your own Web server very easy, if we had explained to people from
the very beginning how important the logs are—and why you shouldn't
let other people keep them for you—we would be in a rather different
state right now.

We created the idea that we could share operating systems and all the rest
of the commoditizable stack on top of them. We did this using the curiosity
of young people. That was the fuel, not venture capital.

What we need to say is that that curiosity of young people could be
harnessed because all of the computing devices in ordinary day-to-day use
were hackable....This is happening now elsewhere in the world as it
happened in the United States in the 1980s. Hundreds of thousands of young
people around the world hacking on laptops. Hacking on servers. Hacking on
general-purpose hardware available to allow them to scratch their
individual itches, technical, social, career and just plain ludic itches.
"I wanna do this, it would be neat." Which is the primary source of the
innovation that drove all of the world's great economic expansion in the
last ten years. All of it. Trillions of dollars of electronic commerce....It
should embolden us to point out once again that the way innovation really
happens is that you provide young people with opportunities to create on an
infrastructure that allows them to hack the real world, and share the
results.

The nature of the innovation established by Creative Commons, by the Free
Software Movement, by Free Culture, which is reflected in the Web, in
Wikipedia, in all the Free Software operating systems now running
everything, even the insides of all those locked-down vampiric Apple things
I see around the room. All of that innovation comes from the simple process
of letting the kids play and getting out of the way. Which, you are aware,
we are working as hard as we can to prevent now completely. Increasingly,
all around the world, the actual computing artifacts of daily life for
human individual beings are being made so you can't hack them. The computer
science laboratory in every 12-year-old's pocket is being
locked-down....If you prevent people from hacking on what they own
themselves, you will destroy the engine of innovation from which everybody
is profiting.

We said from the beginning that Free Software is the world's most advanced
technical educational system. It allows anybody anywhere on Earth to get
to the state of art in anything computers can be made to do, by reading
what is fully available and by experimenting with it, and sharing the
consequences freely. True computer science. Experimentation, hypothesis
formation, more experimentation, more knowledge for the human race.

Which brings us back to this question of anonymity, or rather, personal
autonomy. One of the really problematic elements in teaching young people,
at least the young people I teach, about privacy, is that we use the word
privacy to mean several quite distinct things. Privacy means secrecy,
sometimes. That is to say, the content of a message is obscured to all but
its maker and intended recipient. Privacy means anonymity; sometimes that
means messages are not obscured, but the points generating and receiving
those messages are obscured. And there is a third aspect of privacy, which
in my classroom, I call autonomy. It is the opportunity to live a life in
which the decisions that you make are unaffected by others' access to
secret or anonymous communication.

There is a reason that cities have always been engines of economic growth.
It isn't because bankers live there. Bankers live there because cities are
engines of economic growth. The reason cities have been engines of economic
growth since Sumer is that young people move to them to make new ways of
being. Taking advantage of the fact that the city is where you escape the
surveillance of the village, and the social control of the farm.

The network, as it stands now, is an extraordinary platform for enhanced
social control. Very rapidly, and with no apparent remorse, the two largest
governments on earth, that of the United States of America and the People's
Republic of China have adopted essentially identical points of view. A
robust social graph connecting government to everybody and the exhaustive
data mining of society is both governments' fundamental policy with respect
to their different forms of what they both refer to, or think of, as
stability maintenance. It is true of course that they have different
theories of how to maintain stability for whom and why, but the technology
of stability maintenance is becoming essentially identical.

We who understand what is happening need to be very vocal about that. But
it isn't just our civil liberties that are at stake....We need to make
clear that the other part of what that costs us is the very vitality and
vibrancy of invention culture and discourse....And that freedom to tinker,
to invent, to be different, to be non-conformist—for which people
have always moved to the cities that gave them anonymity, and a chance to
experiment with who they are, and why they can do.

This more than anything else, is what sustains social vitality and economic
growth in the 21st century. Of course we need anonymity for other reasons.
Of course we are pursuing something that might be appropriately described
as protection for the integrity of the human soul....

We need Free Software, we need Free Hardware we can hack on, we need Free
Spectrum we can use to communicate with one another, without let or
hindrance. We need to be able to educate and provide access to educational
material to everyone on Earth without regard to the ability to pay. We need
to provide a pathway to an independent economic and intellectual life, for
every young person. The technology we need, we have.

I have spent some time...trying to make use of cheap, power-efficient
compact server computers, the size of AC chargers for mobile phones, which
with the right software we can use to populate the Net with robots that
respect privacy, instead of the robots that disrespect privacy, which we now
carry in almost every pocket.

We need to retrofit the first law of robotics into this society within the
next few minutes or we're cooked. We can do that. That's civil innovation.
We can help to continue the long lifetime of general-purpose computers
everybody can hack on—by using them, by needing them, by spreading them
around. We can use our own force as consumers and technologists to
deprecate closed networks and locked-down objects.

Then came Edward Snowden. And then, a few months later, in November and
December of last year, Eben gave four lectures at Columbia Law School
titled "Snowden and the Future". In them, he revisited some of what he said in
the speech above, and laid out specific assignments I now pass along to
Linux Journal readers:

We need to decentralize the data, you understand. If we keep it all in one
great big pile, if there's one guy who keeps all the e-mail and another guy
who does all the social sharing about getting laid, then there isn't really
any way to be any safer than the weakest link in the fence around that
pile.

But if every single person is keeping her and his own, then the weak links
on the outside of that fence get the attacker exactly one person's stuff.
Which, in a world governed by the rule of law, might be exactly optimal:
one person is the person you can spy on because you've got probable cause.

E-mail scales beautifully without anybody at the center keeping all of it.
We need to make a mail server for people that costs five bucks and sits on
the kitchen counter where the telephone answering machine used to be, and
that's the end of it. If it breaks, you throw it away.

Decentralized social sharing is harder, but not so hard that we can't do
it. Three years ago I called for it. Wonderful work has been done that
didn't produce stuff everybody is using, but it's still there: it can't go away,
it's free software, it will achieve its full meaning yet.

For the technologically gifted and engaged around the world this is the big
moment, because if we do our work correctly, freedom will survive and our
grandkids will say: so what did you do back then? I made SSL better.

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